Earlier this month several members of the lab converged on Florence, Italy, for the annual meeting of the Society for Experimental Biology. As always with the SEB, it was an incredibly fun conference packed with amazing and inspiring talks.

Lucy Cotgrove talking about the effects of metabolism and temperature on behaviour of fish schools.

Marion Claireaux discussing the work she did in our lab on how metabolism affects group behaviour and how this varies with group size.

Jolle Jolles talking about the integration of physiology and behaviour in the study of collective animal behaviour.

Davide Thambithurai talking about how hypoxia may affect capture vulnerability in fish.

Daphne Cortese on how female size affects offspring quality in clownfish around Moorea.

Jack Hollins discusses his work looking at how temperature affects vulnerability to capture in fish and links with metabolic traits.

Julie Nati talking about how variation in thermal sensitivity within species varies with latitude.

Marie Levet with her poster on how boat noise affects fish metabolic rate.

Mustafa Soganci with his poster on how hypoxia affects fish schooling behaviour.

Anna Persson presenting her poster on her honours project which looked at diurnal variation in coral reef fish.

At the Euro Evo Devo conference in Galway, Ireland (26-29 of June), Tiff gave an oral presentation on how maternal mouthbrooding contributes to the development of craniofacial shape in four species of African cichlids. Despite some technical difficulties (her talk got lost!), and some intense heat, the talk went over well and she received some useful suggestions for future analysis.

Last week Shaun was in Bergen, Norway, for a meeting of collaborators and consultants on the ConEvolHer Project, coordinated by Katja Enberg. It was an incredibly stimulating week of science with some fantastic people. Thank you Katja and lab for organising such a great meeting!

This week Anita Racz traveled to here native Hungary to attend the 10th Annual European Zebrafish Meeting. There she presented her poster on a project carried out by herself and Toni Dwyer examining the effectiveness of various disinfectant methods for zebrafish eggs. Well done Anita!

Last week biologists from all over the globe descended upon Brighton in the UK for the annual meeting of the Society for Experimental Biology. As always the conference was jammed with incredible talks and was a great chance to catch up with old friends.

Our Institute at the University of Glasgow was particularly well-represented with a contingent of 14 staff and students in attendance. This included several talks and posters from the Killen lab and collaborators as well as a highly successful session organised by Shaun Killen and Stefano Marras on The Role of Individual Variation in the Behaviour of Animal Groups. We're already looking forward to next year in Gothenberg, Sweden!

Master's student Brooke Allan presents her poster on social interactions and metabolic traits in minnows.

Ph.D. student Julie Nati is caught mid-blink as she presents here poster on how invasive bullheads and native stone loaches may differ in their hypoxia tolerance.

M.Res. student Ben Cooper giving a presentation on his work looking at how shoaling tendencies in sticklebacks may cause them to experience deviations from their individual temperatures preferences.

Killen lab collaborator and visiting Ph.D. student Matt Guzzo (University of Manitoba, Canada) presents his work looking at how brief but repeated foraging forays into warm temperatures may affect the growth and metabolism of lake trout.

Ph.D. student Tiffany Armstrong (co-supervised with Kevin Parsons) presents her work on how variation in maternal egg brooding quality may affect the social behaviour of offspring.

Killen lab collaborator and Ph.D. student Lauren Nadler (James Cooke University, Australia) giving a talk on her work looking at how exposure to shoal-mates can reduce metabolic rates in tropical damselfish. Congrats also to Lauren for winning this year's Young Scientist Award!!

Shaun Killen talks about his recent work in Brazil with Andrew Esbaugh, Tadeu Rantin, and David McKenzie on social air-breathing in African sharptooth catfish.

Photo of fish swimming with an external isopod parasite, courtesy of Sandra Binning.

I am proud to announce that Tony Williams (Simon Fraser University, Canada), Ryan Calsbeek (Dartmouth College, USA) and myself are organizing a symposium at the upcoming annual meeting for Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in New Orleans, USA (January 4-8, 2017), entitled The Ecology of Exercise: Mechanisms Underlying Individual Variation in Movement Behavior, Activity or Performance. Confirmed speakers are listed below, but we are also inviting other interested speakers to submit abstracts (register and submit on the SICB website here, deadline for abstracts is September 1, 2016 ).

How hard do free-living animals work? What determines how hard individuals will work on specific activities? Is "exercise" a useful paradigm to apply to animal movement? Can animals work too hard, such that they pay costs of high levels of activity? Until recently, much work on "exercise" has been based in the laboratory (e.g. wheel- or treadmill-running in mammals and reptiles, birds flying in wind tunnels) and has been divorced from ecological context. To what extent do these systems provide good models for understanding activity in free-living animals (during routine behaviour such as foraging) and in particular do they help us understand the physiology of exercise in free-living animals. In this symposium we will define movement and exercise broadly as any behaviour that elevates the level of intensity of activity, in response to an ecological demand for increased performance. This can include situations which are widely assumed to be "demanding" such as long-distance migration or foraging behaviour associated with parental care. However, we will also consider other activities like escaping predators (or mates), pursuing prey and engaging in energetic mating displays.

This symposium is especially timely given the rapid pace of recent technological advances (geolocators, GPS, accelerometers) which are giving biologists an unprecedented ability to track the behaviour of free-living animals 24/7. This will allow researchers to directly address questions of individual variation, mechanisms, and fitness consequences of variation in movement. To date much of this work has been behavioural in nature: describing individual variation in movement patterns, and relating this to outcomes such as evading a predator. Much less work has addressed the physiological mechanisms underlying individual variation in performance, although this topic is the subject of quite heated, but largely theoretical debate. By highlighting "mechanisms" in this SICB symposium we hope to foster collaborations whereby physiologists and endocrinologists can work with ecologists, to fully exploit the potential of new bio-tracking and bio-logging technology

The speakers in this symposium will cover a wide range of animal taxa, different types of activity, behaviour or performance, and both laboratory- and field-based studies. However, we will encourage all speakers to address four central questions:

How hard do free-living animals work during movement associated with any behaviour that elevates the level of intensity of activity, in response to an ecological (or evolutionary) demand for higher performance?

Can paradigms of "exercise" and "training" be applied to free-living animals and are these useful concepts to apply to animal movement?

Can animals work too hard during "routine" activities (e.g. rearing offspring, catching prey), such that they pay costs of high levels of activity?

To what extent do laboratory-based studies of activity and exercise (e.g. wheel- or treadmill-running in mammals and reptiles, birds flying in wind tunnels) provide good models for understanding activity in free-living animals?